Going Grey
by elanev91
Summary: When James finally starts going grey, you would have thought the entire bloody world had caught on fire. (They Lived AU? Grey Hair AU? JAMES IS GETTING OLD AU? All of the above, assuming they're real AUs)


**In honour of the grey hair I found on my head today.**

 **Disclaimer: These characters aren't mine. Obviously.**

* * *

When James finally starts going grey, you would have thought the entire bloody world had caught on fire.

It's Sirius who spots it first, the one shining silver strand in the mass of black hair on James' head. They're trooping in, brooms over their shoulders, mud on their quidditch boots, and James has Harry wrapped up under his arm, rubbing his head while Harry laughs at James' insistence that "You can't slag off your old man. I would have kicked your _arse_ back in the day."

"Yeah," Harry yells, elbowing his father in the side, " _back in the day."_ Sirius barks a laugh, claps Harry on the back, "Nice one, kid." James shoots him a glare and he shoves James' shoulder, "Tough break, mate. Though your kid kicking your arse goes nicely with that grey hair you've got there. Very fitting."

When Lily finds them a few minutes later, Harry is doubled over, barely breathing with laughter, and James and Sirius are nothing more than a tangle of limbs on the now excruciatingly muddy kitchen floor. She pulls out her wand, twirls it deftly between her fingers, calmly threatens to hex them within an inch of their lives if they don't get up right now and clean the floor.

Sirius pops up immediately, laughing that he "didn't survive a whole bloody war to die in the Potter's kitchen," and James groans, pulls his wand out of his back trouser pocket, and scourgifies the mess. Lily smiles, reaches down and grabs James' hand to pull him to standing, plants a lingering kiss on his lips. Harry catches Sirius' glance and rolls his eyes - Sirius laughs, James smiles against Lily's lips and pulls away, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and giving Sirius the finger with his wand hand. It takes a bit of manoeuvring with his wand in his hand, but giving Sirius the finger is always worth it.

"Tell our lovely Lily what we found on your head James."

Sirius' eyes are shining with amusement and Harry starts laughing again. James, on the other hand, doesn't look even remotely amused, and when he turns to Lily, he looks like he's just watched someone murder their cat. "I have…" he swallows and Sirius and Harry are both laughing now because James is just _too dramatic to function_ , "I have a grey hair."

Lily laughs and James blanches, "It's not funny!"

She's shaking with laughter, her side vibrating against his and James huffs, goes to sit down at the kitchen table, "I'm glad my descent into old age, _the gateway to death,_ is so amusing for everyone."

Lily rolls her eyes, "Oh sod off, you prat," she sits down next to him, plants a kiss on his cheek (James smiles in spite of himself), "you have one grey hair. Sirius went grey _ages_ ago, why are you freaking out about this?"

It's true - somehow Sirius had been the first of all of them all to go grey, but he hadn't cared one bit. He'd started crossing his fingers, hoping he would get more grey to _fill out his look_ and started arranging his hair to try and get the grey to _pop_ when he pulled his long hair back. As much as they all rolled their eyes at him, it was a good thing he was reacting so positively - Sirius cared _a lot_ about his hair and they knew he would have brought the place down if he hadn't adjusted to his new look.

Sirius flips his hair over his shoulder, smirks at them, "Yeah, but I make salt and pepper look _dashing_." Lily smirks, "Remus only tells _you_ that. You should hear what he tells me when you're not around."

Sirius gives her the finger and she grins. "But honestly James," she says, taking his hand, "you're making a big deal out of something that doesn't matter at all."

"But, Lils," he's whining and Lily sighs, pats his thigh, "Remember when I used to look like that?!"

He points at Harry, who is now on the other side of the kitchen, having lost interest in his dad's midlife crisis - he's sitting on the counter, a chocolate digestive hanging out of his mouth while he puts the kettle on. Lily raises her eyebrow at Harry, he flushes just a bit (so much like his father that a raised eyebrow from his mother is enough) and slides off the counter, swallows the chunk of biscuit he'd been chewing, and offers them all tea. Lily smiles, but there's a slight edge to it, reminding him that it didn't matter that they were family, she expected him to be polite and offer, "That would be lovely, Harry, thank you."

Harry busies himself with the tea and Lily grins back at James, "Yes, James, you were quite a looker. But," she moves her hand from his thigh, wraps her arm around his waist and leans over, her lips brushing his ear, "you're still pretty fucking fit, Potter."

He turns and grins wickedly at her, begins trailing his fingers lightly over her thigh and whispers, "You think so, Evans?" His voice takes on that rough, almost gravelly quality that she _loves_ and she nearly forgets that they aren't alone when Sirius clears his throat as loudly as humanly possible, "Well, that's my cue. I suggest you make yourself scarce too, kid."

Harry turns round, having just put tea bags in a collection of mugs on the counter and groans, "Mum! Dad! Not again, bloody hell." The fact that this a common enough occurrence to warrant a 'not again,' from Harry sets Sirius laughing, but neither James nor Lily look like they care in the least.

James glances at his son and winks, "I can't help that your mum is gorgeous, son."

Harry groans and Lily rolls her eyes at him, "Please, Harry. Don't act like your father and I don't know about Ginny coming over here in the middle of the night last week."

"Yeah," James says, grinning at Lily, laughter barely contained to the edges of his voice, "And from what we heard, you gave a good show of it, son."

Harry flushes red, redder than Lily's hair, and turns to Sirius, "Uncle Pads take me with you. _Please_. I..." Harry hesitates, clearly thinking of a reason, _any reason,_ to leave the house and avoid his parents and a conversation he really doesn't want to have, "I have to talk to Uncle Moony about our summer assignment."

Sirius' laughter is echoing around the kitchen, but he nods at Harry all the same. "Yeah, okay, kid," Sirius' grin is all too knowing, but Harry doesn't care _he's getting out of there_ so he dashes upstairs, grabs his summer assignment and a few books and is shoving them in his rucksack as he's running down the stairs. "UNCLE PADS, LET'S GO!" He opens the front door and runs out into the front garden, slamming the door shut behind him.

"Traumatising your kid must be really fun," Sirius says, laughing at Lily and James, now not even bothering to hide the fact that his hands are up the back of her shirt. Sirius and Remus both have seen them, over the years, in a variety of stages of undress, and neither of them really cares anymore. "It is," Lily says, biting back a groan when James presses a kiss to her neck, "Now get out, Pads."

James' shirt is already off and tossed into the corner of the kitchen when Sirius shuts the door.

* * *

Distracting James from things that were really only upsetting because he's ridiculously dramatic was usually a fairly easy prospect, especially since Lily had spent two decades perfecting her repertoire of distractions. It had worked, well enough, until James found _another_ grey hair on his head a week later.

She's sitting at the kitchen table, _Daily Prophet_ in one hand, cup of tea in the other, enjoying a quiet morning because Harry is at the Weasley's _and Merlin, we don't get to do this enough_ when James screams bloody fucking murder from their bathroom upstairs. Lily jumps, sloshing tea all down her front and over the paper in her hand, before cursing wildly and storming upstairs.

"James, you better be dead, I swear to _fucking_ christ. I just spilled tea all over the goddamn place down stairs!"

She walks into the bathroom and finds him standing there, _comb in hand,_ pulling back layers of his hair, staring in horror at his reflection. She laughs, at first, because in all the years they've been together, she's never actually see him with a comb in his hand before, but she quickly remembers that she's supposed to cross with him (very fucking cross) because her favourite white shirt is now covered in tea stains. They'll come out easily enough with a good cleaning spell, but that isn't the bloody point.

"Why, for the love of _Merlin,_ are you screaming like someone is trying to light your arse on fire?!"

James drops the comb from his hair and turns, a frown etched onto his face, "I found another grey hair." She wants to laugh, and normally she would have, but the look on his face is weird - he's being dramatic, as always, but there's something _real_ there too, something that tells her that he is, genuinely, freaking out about the fact that his black hair is starting to take a lighter turn.

She takes his hand and pushes him down onto the edge of their tub before standing in front of him and running her fingers through his hair to make sure that he was actually seeing something _real_ instead of something that his delusional brain was making up. Sure enough, under one of the many layers of hair at the front of his head, she finds a new grey strand standing tall amidst the dark, chaotic storm that was the rest of his hair.

James sucks in a breath when her fingers still in his hair, "You see it!"

She moves her hands to his cheeks and tilts his head up so that he's looking at her, "Yeah, I see it." He groans, "I'm _old,_ Lil. How did I get old?! I still feel like I'm barely 20 and then I look in the mirror and I'm like, _who the fuck is that old guy?"_

Lily frowns and leans down to press a kiss to his lips, "You're not old, James. And you're still so bloody handsome, I don't know what you're on about."

"You're only saying that because you're being nice." He's pouting and she laughs brightly, "James Fleamont Potter, you know I don't say things to you just to be nice." He sighs but a smile breaks through on his lips, "Isn't that the truth."

She smacks his shoulder, lightly enough so that she doesn't make him lose his balance and fall back into the tub. He's already worried about a grey hair, she doesn't need him to crack his head open and have him freaking out about that on top of it. "I don't see what you're so worried about," she says, moving her hands to run her fingers through his hair again, to try and straighten the mess into something vaguely like a hairstyle.

"I just…" James' hands move from the side of the tub and grasp her hips, pulling her a step closer, letting his fingers work their way under the hem of her now almost dry t-shirt, "I remember thinking, when we were still in school, that by the time I got grey hair I was going to be this old man, like 60 or something. And here I am, not even 40 yet, and I have two." She raises her eyebrows at him and James sighs, "It's just making me realise that time is going by a lot faster than I ever thought it would."

Lily nods, moves her hands to his cheeks again, brushes her thumb along his cheekbone, "Having a few grey hairs doesn't make you _old,_ James. It's your attitude more than anything else." He sighs again, "But how long until suddenly I'm acting like an old man too? I can't even keep up with Harry when we're playing quidditch now."

She smiles softly at him, "James, Harry is 17. Not being able to keep up with him doesn't make you old. He's just young and, honestly, James, he plays quidditch all the time at school. Did you actually expect you'd be as good as you once were after you stopped playing every bloody day?"

He frowns, "But that's just it, I _used_ to be. I… look, I know that I'm not that old yet and I'm not upset about _right now_ … not really. This is just," he drops his eyes for a second, but Lily clicks her tongue sympathetically at him, tangles her fingers in the hair at the base of his neck, and his eyes meet hers again, "This is just the beginning, that's all."

"You knew you were going to get older, James," she says, stepping closer to him. He nods, "Yeah, but I didn't think it would happen so fucking fast."

She can't think of anything else to say, because, really, there isn't anything to say, so she just kisses him.

They are getting older, both of them - seeing Harry reminds her every day how quickly time has flown by, how little mercy it shows to the people it upsets in its wake. She wants James to feel better, to know that, no matter how old they get, that she loves him just as much, no, more than she ever did, that her heart still falters in her chest when his eyes meet hers across the kitchen table, that she still traces her eyes over him while he's lounging on their sofa in the sitting room, admiring the long, lean lines of his body, and feels the same thrill in her gut that she felt when they were 17 and hopelessly in love and uncertain of their future.

The war had changed them, made them grow up faster than they'd wanted to, forced them to face things they weren't ready to face. They'd lost friends, best friends, found out that one had been willing to give them, their lives, their _son,_ over to the other side. They'd nearly lost it all and the weight of that, in the months and years after, was something they'd had to push against every bloody day. But they'd come through it.

They didn't like to admit it, but they were stronger for it.

Knowing that, knowing how much they'd been through together, how much they'd shared, how much she bloody well loved him because of it, because of everything made her smile, just a bit, against his lips and he pulls back, his hands halfway up the back of her shirt and his cheeks flushed, "What?" his voice is barely more than a whisper and she grins, presses her lips to his again, briefly, and says "I love you."

He quirks his eyebrow, "Oh?" and she laughs, hits his shoulder again, but nods, "Yes, you git."

He presses his hands into the middle of her back, pulling her body so that she's flush against him now, her hips hitting just above his despite the fact that he's sitting on their tub, "How did we get there from 'Wow, James, you're old'?"

She rolls her eyes but weaves her fingers into his hair all the same, "First of all, I never said that you're old," he grins impishly and she kisses him again before continuing, "Second, I was just thinking about how… well, everything that we've been through. We might be old now, but we've seen some shit, Potter." He laughs, louder than she'd expected him to, his laugh echoing off the bathroom walls around them and making her laugh too.

"We certainly have, Evans," he says, grinning at her, "but no one said that you're old."

She laughs, "If you're old, then I'm old. We're the same age remember?"

James quirks his eyebrow at her, presses her against him and moves to standing, "Actually, I believe you're two months older than me Evans." He grins wickedly at her, "You're a cradle robber."

Lily laughs, moves her hands down his chest, lets her fingers work on the button of his trousers, "You caught me, I'm a regular cougar." She rolls her eyes and slips her hands into the waistband of his pants.

They know where this is going, she's only surprised that they didn't get here faster if she's honest. Her shirt is off, his trousers are gone, and before long, James' second grey hair is forgotten in a pile of clothes on their bathroom floor.

* * *

By the third hair, he started to come around a bit. Just a _bit_ , of course, but it was something.

They're standing on the platform, James, Harry, Sirius, Ron, and Ginny are chatting animatedly about some quidditch thing or another, while Lily, Remus, Molly, Hermione, and Arthur, are rolling their eyes, talking about the upcoming school year, trying to block out the quidditch talk because, as Molly says, "These kids and their quidditch are driving me mad, I swear to Merlin."

It becomes impossible to ignore when Harry and Ginny get into what rapidly develops into a shouting match - Harry's lifelong support of Puddlemere has, as it always does, ignited Ginny's love of the Cannons and set them shouting at each other. Lily looks up, watches her son run his hand through his hair in that exasperated way that James does, sees him set a smirk on his lips, put a hand on her hip, and try to talk her down from wanting to hex Harry right that bloody second because "You're such a prat, Harry, _how can you support Puddlemere after what they did last season!?"_

She looks up and finds James watching her, his own hand in his hair and she laughs, looking at the two of them like that, hands in their chaotic ebony hair, a smirk playing on their lips. James winks at her and she feels 17 all over again, like they could be the ones getting on the train instead of the parents wishing their kids goodbye. It's been twenty years, but it could also have been just yesterday.

James comes over to stand behind her after all the kids get on the train, his arms around her waist, hands on her stomach, his chin resting on top of her head. "How is he already in his seventh year?" His chin bumps against her head as he talks, and she sighs, puts her hands on James', "I honestly have no idea."

They stand there while the train roars to life, smiling and waving at Harry when he sticks his head out of the window of the last compartment of the train. Harry sticks his head back in the train only to stick it back out, panicked, a moment later as the train begins to move, "Mum!" Harry shouts, "Tell Uncle Moony to bring my Puddlemere banner! I forgot it!"

Lily is almost positive she sees Ginny whack him in the back of the head with something, but she gives a thumbs up and waves as Harry pulls his head back in the train, laughing before grabbing Ginny under his arm.

"God, that looks familiar doesn't it?" she says, turning her head just a bit so that she can look up at James. He grins, "Yeah, Evans, it does," plants a brief kiss on her lips, before they resume waving to their son, watching until the train rounds the corner.

She smiles up at James when the train is finally gone, takes his hand, and turns on the spot. They pop up at the apparition point in Godric's Hollow and begin walking slowly up the high street towards their cottage - they could have apparated the whole way, but this walk was something they'd started doing after Harry's first year, a way to get used to how quiet their house was about to be for the next few months. At least, that's what it was supposed to be. Once Remus started teaching at the school in Harry's third year, they were now almost constantly bombarded by Sirius' presence. But they kept the walk anyway.

"You two look… _so similar_ , you know that?" she says, grinning up at him, "Especially when he and Ginny got into that tiff about bloody quidditch and you're both standing there with your hands in your hair." She's shaking her head but laughing, and James lets go of her hand to wrap his arm around her shoulder, press her into his side.

"The kid is lucky I passed on my devilishly good looks," he says, winking down at her (Lily bursts out laughing), "too bad he's also like me in that he can't fall in love with a woman who agrees with him about quidditch."

Lily rolls her eyes, wraps her arm around his waist, "We can't go around agreeing with you two about _anything,_ it's one of the only way to keep your egos in check." James grins and presses a kiss to the side of her head, "Well, I'd say you've done a fabulous job with my ego, love."

Lily laughs, "And thank fuck for that, you were _awful."_ James digs his fingers into her ribs and she laughs loudly, drawing the stares of some people on the street - they look away, though, once they realise it's just Lily and James again (they have something of a reputation for being 'that couple' - most of the village finds it charming).

"Do you think we'll get home to find that Padfoot has completely destroyed the house like he did last year?" James asks, smirking at Lily. She sighs, "I bloody well hope not. I'll kick his arse if he has."

James laughs, "Good. Merlin, do you _remember_ how long it took to get the dog hair off everything last year?" Lily groans, "Yes, _fuck_ , that was annoying. Remus needs to start taking that mutt to school with him because _christ."_

They're chatting about Harry's upcoming quidditch season, when they were going to go to Hogsmeade (they particularly enjoyed showing up unannounced when they knew Harry had a Hogsmeade weekend), and how long they thought Harry was going to make it on the train before Ginny hexed him for taking the piss about the Chudley Cannons when _the grey hair_ comes up.

"Well, knowing Harry," Lily says, laughing, "he's probably going to irritate her as much as humanly possible for as long as he can manage - I'd be surprised if he lasts an hour." James nods, "Yeah, that's another thing I wish he'd inherited from you - some bloody sense. And your hair genes."

Lily laughs, reaches across and tousles James' hair, "No! I love your hair, I'm so glad he got yours!" James smirks down at her, "I mean, it is pretty great hair," Lily snorts, "but I did find another grey this morning, so the poor kid will be kicking himself in twenty years."

Lily laughs, "You found a grey hair and you didn't shout like someone was trying to shave you bald?!" James pokes her in the ribs, " _Yes, I did,_ I'm learning to be mature about this. After all, I have grey hair now - I have to be dignified."

Lily nearly doubles over with laughter, "Did Sirius tell you that?!" James runs his hand through his hair, "He might've."

Lily rolls her eyes, "You two are complete prats, I swear to Merlin." James just grins, "Well, wait until you hear about the club for dignified gentlemen that we're starting."

Lily is in tears the rest of the walk home.


End file.
